Friday, 3 February 2012

The End – or the Start – of Ignorance

E.O. Wilson is just the latest biologist to
try turning the base metal of scientific induction into the spun gold of
existential truth. What is the allure of religious certainty for
these folks, and why they can’t heed the lessons of their own discipline?

I’ve
madethe observation before that scientists - especially biologists - make
lousy philosophers, and it doesn’t take long for Professor E. O. Wilson - one
of evolutionary biology’s most prominent lights - to place himself squarely in
that camp.

“No
one should suppose,” he asserts, “that objective truth is impossible to attain,
even when the most committed philosophers urge us to acknowledge that
incapacity. In particular it is too early for scientists, the foot soldiers of
epistemology, to yield ground so vital to their mission. ... No intellectual
vision is more important and daunting than that of objective truth based on
scientific understanding.”

On
the other hand not long afterwards, apparently without intending the irony with
which the statement overflows, he says, “People are innate romantics, they
desperately need myth and dogma.”

None
more so, it would seem, that philosophising evolutionary biologists.

Wilson’s
Consilience is a long essay on
objective truth that - per the above quotation, gratuitously misunderstands
what epistemology even is, whilst at the same time failing to mention (except
in passing) any of its most important contributors - the likes of Wittgenstein,
Kuhn, Quine, Rorty or even dear old Popper. Instead, Wilson characterises
objections to his extreme reductionism as “leftist” thought including - and I
quote - “Afrocentrism, ‘critical’ (i.e., socialist) science, deep ecology,
ecofeminism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Latourian sociology of science and
neo-Marxism.”

Ad
hominem derision is about the level of engagement you’ll get, and the only
concession - a self-styled “salute” to the postmodernists - is “their ideas are
like sparks from firework explosions that travel away in all directions, devoid
of following energy, soon to wink out in the dimensionless dark. Yet a few will
endure long enough to cast light on unexpected subjects.” You could formulate a
more patronising disposition, I suppose, but it would take some work.

“You could formulate a more patronising
disposition, I suppose, but it would take some work.”

What
is extraordinary is that of all scientists, a biologist should be so
insensitive to the contingency of knowledge, as this is the exact lesson
evolutionary theory teaches: it’s not the perfect solution that survives, but
the most effective. There is no “ideal organism”.

In
support of his own case, Wilson refers at some length to the chimerical nature
of consciousness (taking Daniel Dennett’s not uncontroversial account more or
less as read). But there is a direct analogy here: Dennett’s model of consciousness
stands in the same relation to the material brain as Wilson’s consilience
stands to the physical universe. Dennett says consciousness is an illusion - a
trick of the mind, if you like (and rather wilfully double-parks the difficult
question “a trick on whom?”).

But
by extension, could not consilience also be a trick of the mind? Things look
like they’re ordered, consistent and universal because that’s how we’re wired to see them. Our evolutionary
development (fully contingent and path-dependent, as even Wilson would agree) has
built a sensory apparatus which filters the information in the world in a way
which is ever-more effective. That’s the
clever trick of evolutionary development. If it is of adaptive benefit to
apprehend “the world” as a consistent, coherent whole, then as long as that
coherent whole accounts effectively for our physiologically meaningful
experiences, then its relation to “the truth” is really beside the point.

When
I run to catch a cricket ball on the boundary no part of my brain solves
differential equations to catch it (I don’t have nearly enough information to
do that), and no immutable, unseen cosmic machine calculates those equations to
plot its trajectory either. Our mathematical model is a clever proxy, and we
shouldn’t be blinded by its elegance or apparent accuracy (though, in point of
fact, practically it isn’t that accurate) into assuming it somehow reveals an
ineffable truth. This isn’t a new or especially controversial objection, by the
way: this was one of David Hume’s main insights - an Enlightenment piece of
enlightenment, if you will. As a matter of logic, there must be alternate ways
of describing the same phenomena, and if you allow yourself to implement
different rules to solve the puzzle, the set of coherent alternative solutions
is infinite.

“It is extraordinary that a biologist
should be so insensitive to the contingency of knowledge, it being the exact
lesson of evolutionary theory.”

So
our self-congratulation at the cleverness of the model we have arrived at (and,
sure, it is very clever) shouldn’t be overdone. It isn’t the “truth” - it’s an
effective proxy, and there is a world of difference between the two. And there
are uncomfortable consequences of taking the apparently harmless step of
conflating them.

For
one thing, “consilience” tends to dissuade inquiry: if we believe we have
settled on an ineffable truth, then further discussion can only confuse and
endanger our grip on it. It also gives us immutable grounds for arbitrating
against those who hold an “incorrect” view. That is, to hold forth a theory
which is inconsistent with the mainstream “consiliated” view is wasteful and
given it has the potential to lead us away
from the “true” path, may legitimately be suppressed.

You
can see this style of reasoning being employed by two groups already: militant
religious fundamentalists, and militant atheists. Neither is prepared to
countenance the pluralistic, pragmatic (and blindingly obvious) view that there
are not just many different *ways* of looking at the world but many different
*reasons* for doing so, and each has its own satisfaction criteria. While these
opposing fundamentalists go hammer and tongs against each other, their
similarities are greater than their differences, and their greatest similarity
is that neither fully comprehends, and as a consequence neither takes
seriously, the challenge of the “postmodern” strands of thought against which
they’re aligned.

Hence,
someone like Wilson can have the hubris to say things like: “Yet I think it is
fair to say that enough is known to justify confidence in the principle of
universal rational consilience across all the natural sciences”

1 comment:

Very interesting! I found your blog through your review of Intellectual Impostures. As a "militant" atheist, I definitely concede the utility of maintaining a realistic approach to certainty, but still view that certainty as possible in principle.

So yes, there are other ways of viewing the world, and pragmatic reasons for doing so, but aren't some of those "ways" more reasonable than others? I mean, at what degree of accuracy do we assign reliability? It just seems that if we can reliably predict the course of events, that necessarily narrows the field of possible mechanisms by which to model cause/effect.

Whether or not we can assign certainty in the "truth", is it really too soon to rule some answers out?